Building a vision is THE most important thing to do for an entrepreneur. A vision is a cause, a statement of your product (in larger sense, it’s you as the founder, inventor) that speaks directly to the heart of your users. No matter how big or small of a problem you aim to address, the clarity of your vision will make everything comes more naturally: mission statement, product development, marketing, etc..

Step 1: Understanding Vision

Everyone understands vision differently, I personally think vision comes in three forms.

1. Personal Vision: it comes from founders’ personality and behavior pattern. Legendary visionaries/entrepreneurs  like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sam Walton, all  found their calling because their non-failing pattern of  doing things their own way, Steve being the innovator, Bill being the problem solver, Sam being the one who is “for people”. Many generalist entrepreneurs found their vision by simply doing things they naturally are inclined to do.

2. Industry vision: it comes from deep expertise. Google’s vision is to “organize the world’s information”. A generalist can not build something like Google. They might be able to build Dell, but not Google. Google vision comes AFTER two Phd students founders discovered a new way for more effective search that was built on scientific research. Many technology companies with a B-2-B model were founded by industry veterans who have been around certain fields long enough to deeply understand the “pain”. These types of companies are usually started by researchers or industry veterans.

3. Opportunity vision: many companies were founded to solely target one narrow area, such as many online ad networks, facebook/twitter apps, even lot of iPhone apps. They are stripped down version of industry vision because it requires less industry knowledge, hard skills to get it off ground. Many social web 2.0 phenomenons were also products of such visionaries, including Digg.

Step 2: Find your own vision

Since finding vision is so critical for you to happily, rightly go on your entrepreneurial journey, you must find who you are, and what your vision could be.

Since I am still at the early stage of evaluating and planning my startup, I have thought about projects of all three types of visions. I thought about using my professional background (search engine marketing, web analytics), or academic background (mathematical modeling, data mining), I also looked at short term projects such as some twitter or facebook apps; In fact, I spent about 6 months last year building something off twitter API, could it be accepted by some people and maybe sell for half a million dollar, it very well could be if I continued. But I could not find the passion to continue, I could not find the reason “WHY” I was doing it, I quickly gave up that effort.

Today, I am focusing on being myself, learn from my own mistake, look at my past, behavior patterns to see what my “heart” tells me to do. The following is some of the findings (I am still searching, not finished yet)

1. I am not type A (aggressive) business man, nor am I a scholar.

2. I am easily influenced by my environment, more so, by my friends. In fact, most of my achievements (if any) I did it because some of “smart friends” did it before me and I didn’t want to fall behind. I am almost elevated by my environment, because of it, I gained confidence, I aimed higher, I obtained the desire to be original, inventive. Without environment and people who I am exposed to, who I know, who know me, who I admire, I would not be able to dream high.

3. I am an average person: meaning, I like attention, I am not a great listener, I offer unsolicited help but I know the boundary and limit, I can work harder but I am slightly lazy.

4. I am always optimistic (or laid back), I have become ambitious.

5. In real life, I am the “go-to” funny, party person among friends, coworkers, etc., in fact I might be easily a stand up comedian, IF, I don’t speak bad English, which I do. And I am obviously self-obsessed, and can be shallow…Arn’t we all?

6. I like to know what others think about me, in fact, I care a lot what others think of me.

Knowing who I am, Would it be nice for me to invent tools to facilitate my own personal growth? For example, making it easier to be exposed to the motivated environment, quality people? Would it be nice to know what others think of me and make it easier to grow to be better person? Whatever I am inventing, I want to invent tools that I feel deeply connected to, only then I can feel passionate about it and devote to it.

Step 3: Refine your vision

Enough about myself, if you are an aspiring entrepreneur, try step 1; Depending on your vision type, you might need to go through different “self discovery” for step 2 when you are looking for your vision. I think the key is to refine your vision constantly till you are fully convinced. This process may take just a spark, it may take months. Never give up, always pay attention.

Don’t forget, it’s extremely important to think your steps out loud, write them down, because it actually helps you organize your thoughts and get to where you want to be quicker. There is an old Chinese saying: sharpening your axe before cutting the trees.

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Damon Horowitz (BS. Columbia, MS MIT, PHD Stanford) Cofounder of Aardvark.com spoke at TEDxSoma on Jan. 22, 10. He said “..the primary goal of technology should not be replacing human intelligence, rather, facilitating human interaction..”

That is why I think the focus on entrepreneurial pursuit should be the web application sifting through people’s social graph: application should be naturally similar to human interaction and inspire humanity. I think Aardvark.com has done a great job on that, as such, Google acquired it.

Read more on “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine” published by Aardvark, the paper was accepted by www2010. This paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, in which Sergey Brin and Larry Page originally describe the algorithms and architecture of Google. This paper was published 12 years ago in the same WWW conference.

With Google buzz rolling out today, Google cofounder Sergey Brin spoke up about why he thinks it’s important. Pay attention: there are lot of hidden wisdom in his words that our entrepreneurs would find valuable.

This one hints social media/personal communication will become extremely lucrative market just like web search.

“Extracting signal from noise is one of our core competencies, it’s one of the key things we do in our web search product every day. And I think that now peoples’ personal communications are getting to be on a scale comparable to that of web search, so those technologies are becoming far more critical.”

This one hints the state of today’s recommendations technology (hence, lot of room to improvement)

Brin says that he’d like to make the recommendation technology more transparent (as opposed to a black box) but hasn’t yet discussed those details with the Buzz team.

This one hints how to have a successful technology (it’s detail, detail, detail, lot of work, not just ideas)

“I think if you look at the history of technical products, there are a lot of details that matter. It’s not just the general idea, oh I have Email and social. And you know maybe, maybe we got the details right, maybe we didn’t, we’re going to see from today on out. Internally I’ve been very happy with the result. There are a lot of detailed things. If you look at the success of the world wide web, you look at Xanadu (an ongoing Hypertext project founded in 1960) for example by Ted Nelson that had a lot of these concepts yet it wasn’t so successful. There are a lot of details, perhaps chance and timing. I wouldn’t discount something because it’s similar to something in the past…”

Verdict was out, for now. Twitter sees tools, not ads, for revenue.

Many people argue that twitter is or will become a dominant real time search engines. Given Google’s success with search engine ads, it should be easy for twitter to simply replicate Google’s model, putting Bid based ads up along with live stream of tweets on search.twitter.com. Why bother to create “intangible”, “premium” tools?

Twitter has One Solid Reason not to quickly jump into pure Ad-supported business model: people behavior, simply put, how people search. Let’s take a good look at how people use search on Google and twitter.

Majority people search Google to find information they don’t know, because Google gives relevant web results to our immediate needs for information. Businesses find it enticing to show their ads with highly relevant Google search results (links). Google then makes money by charging businesses for showing ads along side with these relevant results. Google was born a utility tool for consumers (as opposed to businesses). Ad model and Google make a perfect couple.

Twitter is different.
Majority people come to twitter to share the information, NOT search We tweet about things we are doing, news we just heard of, thoughts bugging us etc…Most of the time we do not search twitter. While search is the ONLY thing we do on Google.com. Who search on twitter? Businesses. Not consumers. Over and over again, we have seen businesses use twitter to FIND consumers followers on twitter, expand customer base, facilitate communication, spread words, compliment customer service etc. Improved Twitter’s search will play a crucial role for businesses to do that by presenting relevant consumers to businesses in search results. The alternative (for businesses to grow on twitter) is for twitter to present businesses in front of consumers when consumers tweet or search. However, showing ads in tweet stream is intrusive, because people are here to share, not search (like Google). Showing ads in twitter search results are not scalable, because majority people spend majority of their time on twitter to share, tweet, NOT search. Therefore, businesses will not benefit from paid ad from twitter as much as they do from Google.

To summarize:
- Consumers search on Google, hence business ads makes sense for Google
- Consumers tweet and social on twitter, hence ad model does not make sense.

As previously mentioned, Businesses find twitter incredibly useful due to its intimate, real time relationship with consumers/customers. However, businesses also have experienced tremendous difficulty to effectively increase their circle of influence on twitter due to lack of tools. This is where twitter can step in and excel:
- Build a kick ass real time search for businesses to proactively reach out to consumers
- Build kick ass “circle of influence” tools to make it easy for businesses to track, measure, manage their follower base and communication stats.

Twitter founders may not have thought this process like written here, but their gut feeling and access to real time data have already guided them to the right track: a business model built on tools to facilitate communication. After all, twitter is the ultimate social sharing utility.

The questions left to ask is: what does this mean for twitter eco-systems? I have some thoughts to share in the future.

More than a month ago, businessInsider.com published an article outlining 5 reasons why Google should offer to buy twitter for 1B, although I have previously written many times that Twitter won’t sell anytime soon for $1Billion, the author brought up the real value of twitter in this article:
1. Twitter is a hell of a lot more relevant to Google’s business than other big Google ideas
2. Twitter could conceivably threaten Google’s cash cow–search

Author also mentioned Larry Page’s crazy talk 2 years ago about Google’s saving world’s energy crisis: could not agree more. Hats off to Steve-Espinosa

If Google isn’t in talks to buy Twitter, it should be.

Specifically, it should offer the company $1 billion, cash.

Why?

Five reasons:

Google needs a huge new growth engine and Twitter might just fit the bill. The current search product cycle is coming to an end. Google needs an “Office” to go with its “Windows.” It hasn’t found one yet. Twitter–and real-time search–could end up being a monster. If Google waits around to see whether it really WILL be a monster, Twitter will be a hell of a lot more expensive. Remember when Yahoo’s Terry Semel whiffed on buying Google?

Twitter is a hell of a lot more relevant to Google’s business than other big Google ideas, such as YouTube or Larry Page’s plan to have Google solve the world’s energy crisis (see his crazy talk of two years ago). Twitter is also about communications, which is the one part of the content-communications-and-commerce Internet tripod that Google is still weak in.

$1 billion is couch change for Google. Google generates $1 billion of cash every two months. If Twitter ends up being worth $0, as some people persist in thinking, Google can just say “oops” and take a minor write-off. If Twitter ends up being worth a lot more than $1 billion, however, as we and others think is likely, Google will make money. If it ends up being a monster, Google will make a lot of money.

Twitter could conceivably threaten Google’s cash cow–search. This “real-time search” meme is actually a compelling story-line. If you want to know what people are talking about right now, you go to Twitter, not Google. Twitter hasn’t figured out how to make bank off that yet, but it may well do so. Remember how much ridicule was heaped on Google’s worthless “search engine” in the early days?

Like Google, Twitter is already a verb. What company do you know of that owns two verbs?

Would $1 billion be enough to get the Twitter boys to part with their baby? It might, actually. $1 billion is still a lot of money, especially for a company with no revenue. And Google’s global distribution and technology infrastructure would be a help to Twitter. So they’d be silly not to take the offer seriously.

Today, ReadWriteWeb.com posted a great article about “Twitter Crowns Bit.ly As The King of Short Links; Here’s What It Means”., as they put it simply about the truth about “Bit.ly”, the URL shortening service, is that its not a URL shortener, its a trend management and metrics platform. It says that

“People share links to pages in the following ways: by email, on Facebook, on Twitter and through countless other methods. The company that does the best job analyzing that sharing activity and creating a compelling user experience based on it is likely to become a very big deal”

It further concludes:

We don’t want to argue that Bit.ly is the next Google, but the technology it’s brought to market could be very important in the indexing of the social web.

Pulling out Google card got me thinking, thinking hard and way back to pre-Google era, and how searches/indexing/analyzing social web could possibly introduce another Google to the world. Following is what I was thinking out loud, and posted as comment to ReadWriteWeb’s blog post (too long, I know). I hope it can speak to the average Joe.

Let me think out loud: before Google, we searched the web and never could find the relevant website for the keywords. Google came out combing through it with page-rank (algorithms involving huge linear/non linear algebra metrics), then the web became an orderly place when we came to Google’s site.

Now imagine the social web, to simplify the matter, imagine social web being only twitter (which is a good assumption), is it a place with order? Are we frustrated that we can’t seem to find the right…hm…tweets with the right link pointing to the website linked upon by social web? For example, Maybe I am looking for the right tweets pointing me the right resources about Portland since I am about to visit (not really) there, search.twitter.com does not rank the resulting tweets on its search page so I have no way to know which one is a good tweet, maybe with a resourceful link. With Tweepz.com, search results show people with “Portland” in their profile, and you can filter the results in a variety of ways, such as # of followers, join dates etc., but it’s not enough, the filter is too minimal, I still can not find the right people/tweets/links. So let’s try twazzup.com, which is much more advanced as it pulls up most recent tweets with “visit portland” along with “top tweets”, “most popular links”, although I have no idea how they are placed/indexed/sorted. Nevertheless twazzup is one step closer to ideal results about “visit Portland”

With a super smart Bit.Ly, tons of data can be pulled out through its API, service like search.twitter.com or Twazzup could aggregate that “link” data, slice/dice it and present along with the search results which will be better than currently served, which also makes me think: would URL shortening service become the engine of next “social web page ranker”? Or will search engines such as search.twitter.com, twazzup, or tweepz (if they catch on soon) be the driving force? Maybe a solution completely new will emerge, or maybe one will acquire another to form a joint force to present an ultimate “social web Page ranking machine”, and that machine will be key to finding the right information.

So, would the next big player be Bit.Ly, or someone else combining the analysis seen on bit.ly, along with semantic analysis of the tweets?

I hope I am making sense for you of this social web search phenomenon, and through which we will understand where to focus our energy.

Twitter’s biz stone posted a blog today

I found some clues that acquisition would highly unlikely to happen any time soon.

1. Mar. 7, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google said it’s highly unlikely for Google to acquire twitter soon, on Charlie Rose show.

2. Twitter acquired a search engine for its own purpose back in 2008 and launched new search feature. It needs a lot more work to get to the point of real search engine. That is where a potential product partnership is possible

3. a high profile Google employee Douglas Bowman, head of visual design team just joined Twitter at the end of Mar.: it’s hard to imagine Eve or Biz Stone did not mention about acquisition potential to Douglas. If they did, that move won’t happen

4. For 48 hours since April 1 the fools day, my Google alerts about “twitter” never spit out any alerts at all about twitter: Google does not want too many people find out too many details about twitter, but somehow, someone knew some rumors are about to happen

5. No acquisition detail talk at all

6. Eve the CEO of twitter twitted on April fools day saying “There is no Twitter Pro” – could be a joke but at least it means twitter is NOT betting big on pro account. which means it is betting big on search, which means twitter think it’s the future of search, not Google, which also means, twitter could be the next Google. Do u think Evan would want to just do another deal with Google to repeat his previous success? Or do u think he wants to beat Google? I think latter.

I don’t think Google/Twitter acquisition will happen. Why in the hell, the lead visual designer at Google will join twitter days before Google buys twitter, without Eve telling him anything? Ok, I get it, cash is the king. But what about exercise date for the option granted to new employee, would that be extremely frustrating to go back and stay till the day options will all mature?

Mar. 7, 2009 – Schmidt: Google \'unlikely\' to buy Twitter soon on Charlie Rose Show

Motley analyzed on Mar. 4 that in three weeks of time, Google may acquire Twitter. Incredible stuff! Reporter/analyst was Rick Aristotle Munarriz: you go man!

(You can review the article here as well: )

You always hurt the ones you love.

That bullying boy in kindergarten, tugging on a girl’s pigtails until she cries? He’s got it bad for her. He just can’t express it yet. Similarly, Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Eric Schmidt turned heads by teasing Twitter during this week’s Morgan Stanley technology conference.

In referring to Twitter and its kind as little more than a “poor man’s email systems,” Schmidt is simply protecting his turf. With “Twittering” replacing “Googling” as the media’s Web verb of choice these days, it’s hardly surprising that the search giant would start getting defensive.

Google isn’t really taunting Twitter — it’s negotiating. Taking Twitter down a few pegs helps drive a lower price and soothes antitrust regulator concerns. And if history is any kind of dependable professor, Google is now three weeks away from swallowing Twitter whole.

Wait, hear me out!
On Oct. 1, 2007, Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Steve Ballmer took a shot at Facebook. “I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people,” he told Times Online.

That may seem like a hypocritical thing for Ballmer to say, given how Microsoft angles for pimply teens with its Xbox 360 and Zune. Sure enough, three weeks after taunting the social-networking site, Microsoft announced its $240 million investment for a piece of Facebook.

This is how it works, people. When there’s a perceived threat, you poke it with a stick. If it moves — and you’re a cash-rich company — you buy it. You saw it happen when eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) bought PayPal after its own payment platform failed; when Google bought YouTube after its own video service failed to catch on; and when companies such as Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) and News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) snapped up social-networking sites to attract younger audiences.

You always hurt the ones you love? Sure, but you also always buy the ones you need. Enjoy these last few weeks of being single, Twitter.